Magnificent. Introducing the Browning Automatic Rifle, a weapon that lets you spend exactly as much ammo as you need to one-shot the enemy.

I think the most obvious card to compare this to is Lightning Gun, and I think they tend to be neck-and-neck. The key here is that the Lightning Gun's insane +5 bonus is usually more than you need, given that every character who can buy this already has at least 4 . Mark Harrigan in particular is going to prefer the BAR's more judicious approach to spending ammunition.

Some noteworthy interactions:

• Probably the best card to date to combine with Sleight of Hand, so Zoey Samaras and Leo Anderson should especially consider it.
• One of the few cards for which Contraband unambiguously pulls ahead of Extra Ammunition.
• Speaking of which, Extra Ammunition and BAR are genuinely terrible together. You want Extra Ammunition to at least double your usage out of a weapon, and this combination is nowhere close. (I might consider it before Contraband, though. You could probably make the case that it's worthwhile to get 22 ammo instead of 16.)

The BAR seems to just generally love Rogue cards, actually. Even Double or Nothing, a card I'm not ordinarily fond of, can seriously up its game in a BAR deck, where its chances of producing a 10-damage strike are much better than with Shotgun.

In all, the Extra Ammunition problem prevents the BAR from being quite as good as the Lightning Gun, but it's not quite as expensive, either, so they're roughly in the same tier. (Lightning Gun pulls ahead on Expert, though, because its +5 becomes more relevant.)

The BAR seems so powerful for Leo that I think it's my automatic first upgrade if I ever run him.

M1918 BAR is very strange weapon comparing other Firearm weapon. If you consider to use BAR, I recommand adding BAR-supporting cards.

BAR itself is not a good weapon. If you don't consider any supporting cards, you can easily find alternatives. I believe you don't use this weapon with spending 1 ammo(=1 damage) without anything. Then, you could trigger at most 4 times. Flamethrower has 4 ammos with 4 damage, and Lightning Gun has 3 ammos with 3 damage. If you want to find more continual weapon, .45 Thompson, Holy Spear, or Enchanted Blade exists.

However, BAR has high potential. BAR deals 5 damage with 1 action, which is the highest value among weapons. BAR has 8 default ammos, which is the largest among Firearm.

Supporting Cards

• Supplying Ammunition: Contraband, Swift Reload. Here, BAR has and spends lots of ammos. Thus, the card adding flat ammunition is bad. Sadly, both cards are cards. Note that Contraband can be played by another player, so that you may find your teammate with Double, Double.
• Extra Damage: Custom Ammunition, Enchant Weapon.
• "Eat lead!": As I know, ammos spent by Eat lead also contribute the BAR damage. However, I'm not sure and it's still issue. It means that you can evade without any ammo loss. Additionally, you can deal more than 5 damage with 100% succeed if ammo is enough.

8 16 32 64 128: 4 Contrabands make BAR as infinite 5 damage weapon. I heard that someone did it with Sefina by playing Contraband and doubled Scrounge multiple times.

So I've had the chance to use this in Dunwich now as Zoey, and I was pretty dubious at first but I think I really like it. I didn't even combo it with any of the ways of getting extra ammo. Ok, the obvious thing to say - in most cases the Flamethrower is better and for various pretty clear cut reasons. But anyway, I had one Flamethrower already and so I got a BAR just to mix it up and try some new stuff and was pleasantly surprised.

The first time I used it got snagged by an Avian Thrall in a very early turn and that really sucked, big time. I ended up spending all 8 ammo in one go to overcome the negative modifier which felt really bad at the time, but it highlighted the flexibility of this gun - not only is the damage flexible, so is the combat boost. Now, ok sure using all 8 ammo in one go is well yeah pretty wasteful, but with the Flamethrower I would've had no way out of that other than to just take a bunch of pot shots and hope I got a 0, or alternatively swap it out for a blade and lose the ammo entirely that way too. Basically, got two rules wrong there. Flamethrower wins that one.

I did get to use it in a more piece-meal way later and the ability to take out a creature with exactly the right amount of health all in one action is pretty strong, stronger than I realised. If you end up spending lots of ammo on a tough monster, you also get a much higher modifier - so it actually scales really well for larger creatures as you're more likely to make the damage stick. To be fair though, taking only one action only really applies to big monster of four or five health, and then you're likely only to get one of those out of the ammo supply.

Another nice point is that with the Flamethrower, a couple of times I found myself wanting to engage more enemies to fully utilise the damage, but that would incur an attack of opportunity. Without the damage efficiency the value of the Flamethrower goes down (though it's still great obviously). Perhaps I should not have swapped out those Taunts earlier? But then we're talking support cards which essentially increases the cost of the weapon. BAR on the other hand doesn't suffer from that problem - exactly as much as you need all in one action. The sheer damage output of the Flamethrower means it still holds up really.

The comparison is more relevant for the Lightning Gun as you really need that second weapon to deal with the monsters with four and five health. This is of course means you need a Bandolier, so support cards again. With two four health monsters you can kill them both in two actions with the BAR. With Lightning Gun you can kill one and damage the other in three actions. Flamethrower says "hi" at this point of course, which is why it's still better, and what it potentially loses in the action efficiency it makes up for ammo/damage supply.

Lastly, I frequently find myself at four XP after a mission too, so this one just feels significantly easier to pick up, even though it's only one XP cheaper.

So the M1918 BAR then? Yeah I actually quite like it.

Disclaimer: I haven't run any detailed math here and haven't searched all the cards for some uber combos. I just made my thoughts regarding this card, the reviews and my personal game experience so far.

If I were able to give this card a revamp I would change two things to make it (in my view) a compatible big gun beside the others.
I would increase the cost to 6 and change the text to something like this:

Uses (8 ammo.)
Spend 1 ammo: Fight. you get +1 for this attack. This attack deals +1 damage. As an additional cost you may spend up to three additional ammo. You get +1 and deal +1 damage for each additional ammo.

with this, the overall performance would be much closer to the other guns and you have essentially two fire modi:

1. single fire: for 4 XP you get 8x 2 damage at +1 for 6 ress. This is a 25% discount over the .45 Automatic (my "gold standard" for weapons). This discount comes with all the drawbacks of a big gun: requires two hands at once, one big target for asset hating treacheries.
2. burst fire: here comes the flexibility (and the justification for XP)! Gain action compression by spending the exact amount of bullets you need for your enemy. Lose a portion of your discount.

Let's see how this compares to the other big guns in our arsenal

1. Shotgun: spending 4 ammo gives you 2 shots at +4 for 5 dmage. Same burst potential, more reliable damage, less synergy with extra ammo cards. I think the "new BAR" has the advantage here.
2. Lightning Gun: spending 2 ammo gives 4 shots at +3 for 3 damage. So one action more than the lighting gun, at a lesser to hit chance. Again harder to reload. I think both weapons are roughly on par, depending on the campaign and player needs.
3. Flamethrower: spending 3 ammo gives 2 shots at +4 for 4 damage and leaving you with to ammo left. Between this two it comes down to flexibility vs. burst. Both weapons are capable of doing max 16 damage, but single shot "new BAR" needs double the amount of actions. Again I think both cover different terrain and would see both their use in game.

Right now, I am no big fan of a big gun guardian. But with the flexibility of the "new" BAR? Yes, could see me using it as a mid campaign upgrade!

PS: I could think of a third "automatic fire" mode with a second action option which could look something like this:
Exhaust M1918 BAR and spend 5 ammo: Fight. You get +2 for this attack. If this attack is successful, instead of its standard damage, you may assign up to 4 damage among enemies engaged with you (any additional damage adds to this total). Enemies damaged by this attack will not attack during the enemy phase.
So you have some suppression mechanic at the cost of damage. I don't know how such a mechanic would balance but flavor wise I think this would be a cool addition.